| | | Maurice you're correct, of course. It's not the 103% loan to value mortgages, without income or asset verification coupled with "Option-Pay" which allowed the buyer to skip any 36 payments, which made penniless waiters and aspiring actors buy $1.2 million homes on a lark.
It was the penniless waiters and aspiring actors, and my housekeeper, who bought these incredibly overpriced homes. They're the cause of the post-9/11 real estate bubble.
Maurice you're perceptive in realizing it's the lenders, bank regulators, and White House who are the victims here of the real estate bubble perpetrated by manipulative-people who were able to sign their name to take a flier in real estate speculation. How could they have possibly known that by offering full purchase price on homes, plus a 3% cash bonus to anyone who was willing to sign their name after 9/11 would create a catastrophic credit bubble? As you say, no one could have predicted that. They offered borrowers the chance to skip the first three years of mortgage payments to help Americans buy only as much house as they could afford.
How could they have predicted that these loans would enable my housekeeper, earning just $50 a day, to purchase six homes worth almost $3 million in total. Like the waiters and actors, she lost her real estate empire in 2008 at the same time loans like hers wiped out bank shareholder equity.
Who could have predicted that these post-9/11 mortgage products would result in a collapse of the banking system between 2006 and 2008.
Yes, they could have predicted this if they had looked back at the prior period of time when Reagan authorized this type of lending and it imploded the Savings & Loan industry. But we certainly can't expect people working in banking or government to remember events which happened 20 years earlier.
You're right, the banks and bank regulators and the White House are the victims here. |
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